Claire Harman’s first book, a biography of the novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for the best work of literature from Britain or the Commonwealth by a writer of 35 or under. Her subsequent biography, of the eighteenth-century novelist Fanny Burney, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. Her last book, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life was published on both sides of the Atlantic in 2006, to great critical acclaim.